Scotty! We Need More Power!

By Alan

I was asked the other day what "The Smart Grid" was, and what it was going to do, and I had to pause a bit, because the term means different things to different people. Predictions about what it will mean are even more difficult, if not impossible. In fact, in order to know more about what's going to happen in the future, we need to understand what's there now. So, we'll do this in two parts. What we have, and what we'll be getting.

First, let's explain a little bit about the Electricity Grid in the United States.

Demand and Supply?

Unlike nearly all other products, electricity must be instantly generated as soon as it is consumed. Notice the order of importance there. Production has to keep up with consumers, not the other way around. Nearly everything else that we produce and consume is opposite: Someone creates the product, and develops inventory, and the consumer buys what's available. In the current electrical market, consumers just consume, and everything else is geared towards keeping up with that demand. Blackouts, brownouts, and sudden soaring prices are all directly related to unexpected difference between demand and supply.

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Augmented Reality

Updated on Friday, October 2, 2009 at 2:48PM by MAD21

Updated on Friday, October 2, 2009 at 8:35PM by MAD21

Updated on Sunday, October 4, 2009 at 10:02PM by MAD21

By Alan

Certainly one of the more interesting technological advances showing up in the consumer environment is the concept of Augmented Reality (or AR):The concept of supplementing a view on the world with additional data via an overlay or heads up display. Ever since television came up with the idea of an overlay with a teleprompter or popup videos, the general public can get the idea of what this means.

What does it look like? Well if we see what Arnold Schwarzenegger was supposed to have seen in the movie Terminator, it was a simple white text and line drawings around the real world. Not just status messages, but actual outlines, three dimensional extrapolation, etc.

Terminator Overlay

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The Human Brain and Social Networking: Programming Musically

By Alan

Sometimes we have interesting things going on in our heads that we don’t understand, but have ways to tap into that unknown quality.

Take for instance this demonstration by Bobby McFerrin at the World Science Festival. He demonstrates that the brains in all humans (regardless of the cultural history or musical training), all have some built-in choral ability to recognize the Pentatonic Scale.

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All News, All the Time

By Alan

More and more, people are either supplementing their news gathering from both TV and newspaper by reading articles and headlines on the Internet.

The New York Times recently published results from a study that showed more people are checking the Internet as part of their morning routine. Breakfast Can Wait. The Day’s First Stop Is Online. It's quite apropos that the Times was writing that story, since they have quite a transition with their newspaper changing from traditional physical paper to online content.

However, going online for news doesn't always mean that people are getting their news from traditional journalistic sources. Many of those surveyed are checking with email, Facebook statuses of their friends, checking Twitter for the latest microblog comments, as well as browsing web news articles from traditional news organizations and non-traditional news sources like blogs.

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Clash of the Titans

Updated on Sunday, August 16, 2009 at 8:02AM by MAD21

By Alan

In case you haven’t heard, the somewhat campy 1981 movie Clash of the Titans is being remade, scheduled to come out Spring of 2010. The theme of the mythical storyline is about a man (even though he was somewhat extraordinary) struggling to survive amongst the conflicts between the gods (little “g”) and the offspring of the gods (called Titans). It was common among the Roman and Greek myths to have conflict among the gods, who don’t actually fight directly with each other, but use humans, titans, and heroes as mere pawns in their epic battles. The poor humans who happened to be nearby often suffered because of these battles.

People today believe that they are in charge of their own destiny, and have the freedom to do what they like. This is true, however, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to be victims as bystanders in some titanic struggle that they didn’t start or fully understand.

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